OVER THE COURSE of the past few years, leaders in retail, commerce, industry, agriculture and Government have come to hear of how the Foresense platform is shaping the future of behavioral analytics, traceability and Big Data.
From retail shopfronts to crop farming, from airports to childcare, from education to hospitality, Foresense promises to revolutionise how behavioural data is collected and collated to inform key decision making at a level never before seen.
But how does it actually work?
While the more technical minded would have already looked into the intricacies of the platform, many may not have stopped to consider exactly how it works…
New Phone Technology is the Key
Firstly, the cornerstone of the Foresense platform is the ubiquity of the modern smartphone.
Global smartphone ownership is rising rapidly. Some estimates place the number of mobile devices as approaching 6 billion – with more than half of that being smartphones.
Numbers aside, they are everywhere we turn in modern technologically advanced societies.
Each and every network connected device, including each and every smartphone, has a unique identifier known as a media access control or MAC address.
Primarily designated by device manufacturers, MAC addresses essentially give a device its own exclusive 12 hexadecimal digit tag, much like a cars registration.
And like a cars registration when in the public eye, it is visible to everyone who is looking.
This is necessary to facilitate initial communication between devices across a network - like when joining a Wi-Fi connection.
Secondly, the Foresense platform hardware consists of a series of proprietary mini-sensors.
Smaller than a deck of cards, they digitally communicate with similarly enabled devices in their vicinity across a Wi-Fi network, including smartphones.
Simply put, it uses existing Wi-Fi installations to interact with smartphones and glean valuable user behavioural data trends.
That is fast – the kind of fast which makes real-time analytics possible.
The firmware and antenna design are optimised to provide the most highly accurate and time-sensitive dedicated analytics sensor on the market.
This approach allows for highly complex data sets to be obtained with both minimal costs and minimal disruption to existing systems.